Silvia Pio

Silvia Pio is an Italian teacher of English as a Foreign Language, a translator and interpreter. She also occasionally teaches creative writing. She has written poetry that has been published in a number of magazines and anthologies in Italy and has had two poetry books published. One of the books has a section of poems in English. She has won the “Cesare Pavese” prize for unpublished poetry.

Silvia Pio is a founder of Margutte, an online literary magazine, and is involved the poetry page. Margutte regularly organize public readings and other activities linked to poetry in Mondovì, the town in north-west Italy where some of the founders live.

At night I write from the bed
and plunder the fruits of darkness
to exchange for coins made of words.
While herding words I gather the hours
in unseemly bundles
to place on the pyre of recollection.
Or launch into the ocean of time.
Then I name all this poetry.

(from “Da terre a terre”, Ël Pèilo, 2013. Twinning between the
Margutte poets from Mondovì and The Red Shed poets from Wakefield)

In the glory of the airy noon
like a swallow gliding
in the fast lane,
this light has a sly shadow.
In the stillness of the dusk
between the unknowable and the sky:
an icon’s blue background.
In the jubilation of the butterflies
heady with flowers and folly,
in this harvest time
we reap but trouble and torment

(from “Da terre a terre”, Ël Pèilo, 2013. Twinning between the
Margutte poets from Mondovì and The Red Shed poets from Wakefield)

In Belvedere
In a late hour together
we arrive once more with a grain of memory.
And again we’ll be hunting for one another
on the stony pavement of your childhood,
in the sappy bush of my temples grey.
Invisible we’ll be dropping pebbles
and finding our way in the cobble design
which lead to the tower:
we’ll be reading the book of its bricks.
The view from here has disclosed
the desires beneath our rinds.
Like seed blooming, fruit ripening and rotting
this story of ours
has grabbed some sense
sheltering it from the winds.

(from “Da terre a terre”, Ël Pèilo, 2013. Twinning between the
Margutte poets from Mondovì and The Red Shed poets from Wakefield)

I once said the apricot tree was my home
because I preferred its clamorous leaves
to the silence sounding the old walls.
When autumn began to confine me inside
I would look to the tree as one looks to a shore
at the end of a travel by sea,
to the sun from a place ransacked by rain.

Now that the tree has died, am I homeless?
I should have chosen oak, chestnut from wildness
but they can die, too, I’m afraid.
And it was an apricot tree which stood by the house,
anyway.

I once said the apricot tree was my home
and now in these rooms
full of sanity, empty of sense
I am left to roam.

The landscape unfolds
virile like a patriarch, and sage.
On the ridge of this light on hold,
snow for pillow,
rows of branches brush the boundary
of the wilderness white and the human toil.
Hanging fog softens,
discloses listening profiles,
and the vision of the sky is prayer.
A breath of wind reveals the strength of soil,
this motionless moment leads
to the rank of the mountains,
keepers of buried time.
Winter, you come back sovereign,
bring grief and dismay,
stories of habits,
far away intention,
and horizons of spring.